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Friday, March 20, 2015

A Guantanamo detainee being led by a guard in March 2002. (Photo: Andres Leighton)

“Those who surrender freedom for security will not
have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

– Benjamin Franklin cited by Mohamedou Ould Slahi inGuantánamo Diary.

On November 20, 2001, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a
30-year-old electrical engineer and telecommunications specialist from
Mauritania, received a visit at his house from two Mauritanian officers summoning him to
answer questions at the country’s intelligence ministry. “Take your car,” one
of the men told him, as Slahi stood in front of his house with his mother and
his aunt. “We hope you can come back today.” He has not returned. After
spending a week in a cell in his native country, the authorities found no
evidence against him. However, at the behest of the Americans, Slahi wasrendered
to a black site in Jordan for six months, and then flown blindfolded, shackled
and diapered to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan for two weeks; from there he was
transported to Guantánamo in Cuba where he remains incommunicable to this day.Three
years into his detention, Slahi wrote in basic idiomatic English he obviously
picked up from his guards – his fourth language and acquired in Guantanamo – a manuscript
which was immediately classified. It took years of litigation and negotiation
by Slahi’s pro bono lawyers to force the military to declassify aredacted
version, heavily black-barred (that sometimes goes on for pages, some of it to
conceal the identity of his interrogators, guards and fellow detainees).

Edited by Larry Siems,Guantánamo
Diary (Little, Brown & Company, 2015) is a searing
account of one man’s descent into a nightmarish inferno. Slahi’s
phantasmagorical experience recalls the fiction of Franz Kafka, a master at
delineating the surreal and the illogical, especially The Trial in which Joseph K. is informed by telephone that his case
will be briefly examined the following Sunday, which turns out to be only the
beginning of his journey through the bureaucracy of terror ending with his
death. But I believe that an equally apt analogy may be located in the persecution
of the Soviet citizen, Eugenia Ginzburg (1904-77). Her comfortable life as a loyal
Party Member and literature teacher was rudely shattered during the Great
Terror (1937-38) after she was also informed by telephone to make a brief
appearance at NKVD headquarters. As recounted in her extraordinary memoirs, Journey into the Whirlwind (1966) and Within the Whirlwind (1981), that
request signalled her portal into the juggernaut of Stalinist terror that
lasted eighteen years. She never again saw her husband who was later arrested
and executed, or one of her two sons who died of starvation in a home for the
children of “enemies of the people.” I
recognize that some readers may find the comparison an odious example of moral
equivalence, but I think it is entirely appropriate to link the two cases, as
did the late historian Tony Judt in an important essay he wrote almost seven years ago:
the Soviets dismissed the rule of law as “bourgeois justice,” in post 9/11
America, some members of the Bush administration regarded the rule of law as a
luxury that could be dispensed with for anyone labelled an enemy combatant.
What distinguishes them – and it is an important difference – is that in
America it was still possible for the judiciary to challenge government power
when judges ruled that state actions could be unconstitutional, and for lawyers
and human rights activists to defend victims of arbitrary state power without
finding themselves locked away.

OnceGinzburg was hurled
into the Stalinist maw, she was subjected to what was known as the "conveyor"
interrogation of seven days without sleep, temperature manipulation of extreme
heat and cold, and charged with being a member of theTrotskyite
terrorist counter-revolutionary group. No longer considered a human being, she
was constantly pressured to name other members of her treasonous group and
confess her crimes. Ginzburg did neither and she considered herself fortunate
that she was not executed. Instead, she was sentenced to years of hard labour
and transported to the goldmines of Kolyma, one of the most formidable and
coldest places on earth where her life was spared by the support of good
friends, especially a German doctor, with whom she fell in love, who enabled
her to acquire inside work first as a nurse than as teacher. A one-time true
believer in communism and the Party, she gradually regarded the system as evil
and the second volume can be interpreted as her mea culpa.

From the outset, the American military were suspicious
of Slahi, not for any alleged involvement in 9/11, but a belief that he had
been the Al-Qaeda mastermind behind the “millennium plot,” the 1999 attempt by
Ahmed Ressam to smuggle explosives over the Canadian border and blow up the Los
Angeles International Airport. Slahi had been in Montreal, although not at the
same time as Ressam, but they had prayed at the same mosque. Slahi travelled
twice in the early 1990s to Afghanistan in order to fight the Soviet-backed
regime, a campaign covertly supported by the Americans, and actions that Slahi
always acknowledged. But he left as soon as the Soviets departed, when the
various jihadi groups began to fight among themselves. He never denied that he
maintained contact with former comrades who had fought in Afghanistan. Because
of this background, his associations with known Al-Qaeda operatives, including
extended family members, and that he acquired his electrical engineering degree
in Germany, the military is convinced that he is an Al-Qaeda recruiter. With
his less than six degrees of separation, Slahi is targeted for the myriad
interrogation techniques of the “special plan” personally approved by the Secretary
of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, reminiscent of those deployed by the Soviets, recounted
by Ginzburg, and dramatized in The
Confession– the 1970 film based on the autobiography of Artur London, a
diplomat who recounts his trajectory into the vortex of paranoia and political
madness during the early 1950sCzechoslovakian Party purges.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi

These sections from Guantánamo Diary document the torture treatment, a grotesque
catalogue of abuses that is chilling to read, confirmed by the release in late
2014 of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the C.I.A.’s
interrogation-and-detention program. Slahi endures long periods of solitary
confinement without his Quran and any sanitary amenities; unrelenting freezing
temperatures, his suffering compounded by being doused with ice (a punishment
that was also inflicted in the Gulag); stress positions, including hours of
standing painfully bent over with his hands shackled to the floor that
seriously inflamed his sciatic nerve and where he frequently soils himself; beatings
about the face and ribs; and sexual abuse where female interrogators rub their
breasts against his body and fondle him. He is blindfolded and taken on a
three-hour boat ride as part of a mock kidnapping and forced to drink salt
water until he vomits. Perhaps worse is the unending sleepless interrogation twenty-four
hours a daywith guards wearing Halloween-like masks. Not
surprisingly, Slahi begins to hallucinate. Broken, he falsely confesses to
planning to blow up the Toronto CN Tower, a landmark which he had not
previously known existed. He names anyone he has heard about and conjures up
incriminating information, anything to stop the pain, a confession that pleases
his interrogator prompting him to offer his captive food. Throughout this
ordeal, Slahi constantly asks of what he is being accused and never receives a
straight answer. It is no surprise that his harrowing treatment yields no
valuable information, but it does reveal much about his resilience and the
character of his interrogators.

If the Diary consisted
of primarily a litany of horrors, it would be a grim undertaking that might
discourage potential readers. Yet, because of the insight and humanity of Slahi,
it is much more. Despite his constant fear that he will be executed and his
family harmed, and the obstacle of the 2,500 redactions, readers can discern his
capacity for distinguishing between the loutish sadists who scream obscenities
at him, insult his religion and exercisewith legal impunity any
form of power or abuse to sandbag him, and the terrified young men, including
one guard who feels so guilty that he admitted to Slahi that he knew he could
“go to hell for what I have done to you,” and also the decent Navy medical
officer who attempts to secure medicine for his sciatic nerve condition. He is
capable of feeling empathy toward some of the guards as he recognizes that they
come from backgrounds of poverty and that they are used by the Army to do the
dirty jobs. Slahi’s humour helps to prevent the slide into despair or hatred
towards his tormentors. One of my favourite examples occurs when he is in
Bagram and is promised that if he tells the truth about his terrorist
involvement he will be released immediately but if lies, he will never see his
family again and they will be sexually assaulted. He knows what he is hearing is
bullshit: “I just wished the government agencies would start to hire smart
people.” Like Ginzburg who maintains her humanity by citing Russian poems,
Slahi takes solace in his faith grateful that he memorized the Quran before his
ordeal begun and prays whenever he can despite the prohibitions of his guards.
Both Slahi and Ginzburg are also more upset by the cries of others than by their
own suffering. When Slahi’s conditions improve in 2004, likely coinciding with
the Iraq transfer of Major General Geoffrey Miller (known for implementing the
“special plan”), he receives medicine, food and books ranging from Henry V to Catcher in the Rye, the latter making him laugh so much “that his
stomach hurt.” His wry humour and curiosity about Western culture are now more
inflected with a gentle irony. When asked to give his guards the
names of characters from Star Wars,
Slahi comments, “I was forced to represent the forces of Evil, and the guards
the Good Guys.” What the reader may find most invaluable about the Diary is that it turnsan
anonymous orange jumpsuit into a three-dimensional human being, a sensitive,
intelligent and victimized individual who harbours no feelings of retribution
toward those who have wronged him.He ends with offering
his interrogators a challenge leavened with grace and absolution: “That he
holds no grudge against any of the people mentioned in this book, that he
appeals to them to read it and correct it if they think it contains any errors,
and that he dreams to one day sit with all of them around a cup of tea, after
having learned so much from one another.”

Two of the 2,500 redacted pages of Guantánamo Diary.

A sceptic might ask whether sympathetic readers to
Slahi’s plight, and I count myself as one of them, are being duped by a clever
snake-oil conman.I strongly doubt we
are being hoodwinked and there are several reasons for my belief. What he says
about his awful treatment has been verified by a number of other sources from
the Senate Report noted above to other inmates such as Moazzam Begg and Murat
Kurnaz who spent time at Guantánamo and wrote their memoirs after their
release. Of equal importance is the valuable introduction provided by Slahi’s
editor, the writer and human rights activist, Larry Siems – who was never
allowed to meet the author – that provides context, and declassified government
documents and monographs that he cites in his extensive and helpful footnotes
that corroborate what Slahi writes. In his introduction, Siems reveals that a
District Court judge who thoroughly immersed himself in Slahi’s habeas petition
concludedin 2010 that the government’s evidence was “so
attenuated, or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment … that it cannot support a
criminal prosecution,” and ordered his release. (That Slahi, through his lawyer,
Nancy Hollander, was able to request a judge to review his case, was only
possible because the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that all prisoners had a right
to habeas corpus, which allows them to challenge their imprisonment in
accordance with the Constitution.) Despite President Obama’s vow to closeGuantánamo
and his argument as a Presidential candidate that all detainees should have
that right, his administration challenged that decision leaving Slahi’s legal status
in limbo.

Slahi’s case demonstrates once again that the rule
of law and due process – that no one is above the law, the existence of an
independent judiciary, the accused has the right to an impartial hearing, that rules
govern court procedures and the admission of evidence, the principle that an
individual cannot lose his liberty unless he has violated a clearly prescribed
law and that he has the right to appeal – are above the power of any
politician, and that they are not merely legal niceties. They are the
cornerstone of the justice system that dates back to the signing of the Magna
Carta in 1215, principles that fell into abeyance for centuries, but were
revived in the eighteenth century and were core beliefs of the Founding Fathers
of America who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and are
fundamental to the 1867 Canadian Constitution Act and the 1982 Charter of Rights.
There are strong reasons for embracing the rule of law: not only does it
protect citizens from arbitrary government but protects us from each other when
enraged individuals may be tempted to take the law into their own hands. The
culture of fear and the so-called War on Terror have delivered a substantial
and possibly an irretrievable blow to a sacred principle. (I do not want to
suggest that even when the rule of law is operative, its application is always
a reality; when justice is denied, there is the possibility that individuals,
including police officers, may be tempted to dispense their own form of rough
justice, as exemplified in Richard Price’s (writing as Harry Brandt) excellent
crime novel The Whites. But the
principle still serves as a restraining check on vengeful impulses.)

Guantánamo
Diary should be widely read but I have doubts that
will happen. There is no visual evidence; no one took pictures that might end
up going viral, as occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq 2004 setting off
an international scandal about how Americans treated their prisoners. Secondly,
Slahi is a Muslim and Muslims do not garner much sympathy given the barbaric
behaviour of ISIS and the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris. After that massacre,
a number of Republican Senators, includingJohn McCain, the former
tortured prisoner in Vietnam, urged the President to stop releasing inmates
fromGuantánamo.
One can only wonder how many Americans support former Vice President Dick
Cheney’s belief that he does not worry about innocent Muslims because he
considers them collateral damage in the war against terror. Yet what remains
widely unknown is that the vast majority of terrorist acts are not committed by
Muslimsand that the overwhelming victims of
Islamist terror are Muslims. Pope Francis has frequently said the Islamic State
does not represent genuine Islam and that “all religions have these little groups.”But it is not surprising that a Muslim doctor and his family are stopped at the Canadian border and prevented from entering
America.

In Canada itself, a number of recent events
substantiate the perception that anti-Muslim feelings are growing and worst of
all it is being lead or exploited for partisan gain in an election year by the
Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. After two separate attacks by jihadist sympathizers
left two Canadian soldiers dead last fall, Harper refused to speak out against
the vandalism against mosques and the racist slurs hurled against Muslim
candidates in Toronto’s municipal election. Not only has he refused to express
any support for Canadian Muslims, in keeping with his hard-edged ideological
impulses, he has more recently escalated a flap over whether a Muslim woman
should wear the face-covering niqab during a citizenship oath into an assault
on the Muslim faith itself when he said that this piece of cloth is rooted in a
culture that is anti-woman. According to Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui,in contrast to Obama, Harper continues
to conflatethrough his rhetoric the Muslim faith with terrorism,
thereby ignoring the greater threats cited in CSIS documents posed by white
supremacists.In this climate of hysteria, is it
possible thatGuantánamo
Diary will be impartially read and that its author,Mohamedou
Ould Slahi, will receive the justice that he surely deserves?